


Under The Neon Stars

by pajamabees



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Injury, M/M, and adam is in the back holding on for dear life, i promise it's not too detailed but the warning is there just in case, i pushed the rating to T because of Shiro's injury, this time Shiro is the driving the motorcycle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-05 21:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17332565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pajamabees/pseuds/pajamabees
Summary: Adam is a prosthetic mechanical engineer who works at a small shop situated in a corner of Platt City's many neighborhoods. Shiro is a regular customer--a reckless, clumsy, motorcycle-driving man who wears leather jackets and metal boots, and drives Adam up the wall with how little he cared for his prosthetic arm. Every month he stopped by without fail, sporting a new injury that Adam had to fix. It was infuriating.Tonight, Shiro shows up after store hours with not only another wound, but also an opportunity that Adam would perhaps be interested in....





	1. Chapter 1

Rain pellets slapped against the rusting metal of the garage, a maddening sound that drowned out the mechanical clinks and tings of the shop. The downpour was so loud Adam could barely hear the retro radio station that always played in the background. He was not looking forward to walking home tonight.

Leather boots padding across the dirty cement floor, Adam packed up the shop, picking up loose screws and throwing any leftover scraps in the Loot Bin. Today hadn’t been very busy because of the weather forecast; customers typically didn’t like open-door shops when it was raining, and looking at how water practically poured down in waves from the opened garage door, Adam understood why. Customers had to leap over the giant puddle situated in front of the uneven entrance, and a few had the unfortunate luck of stepping right into it. Adam had to bring out the old wet floor sign, hoping that the neon words would catch everyone’s attention. It didn’t, and he found himself in the crossfire between his manager and several soggy-shoed customers all day long.

Suffice it to say, Adam was exhausted.

He slammed the metal box of tools he had collected onto one of the crafting tables, wiping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. The variety of tools all needed to be cleaned, and Adam stared at them in contempt. It would take at least an hour to go through them, maybe 45 minutes if he was quick enough….

After staring at the inside of the box for a whole a minute, he finally decided to just wake up early tomorrow to wash the stupid things. He was a morning person anyway.

Nodding to himself, he picked up the box once more and laid it under the table where it was out of direct view, but in a spot he would remember for tomorrow. He was just about to grab his jacket when he heard a familiar splash. He sighed.

“We’re closed—come back tomorrow,” he shouted, not even looking back to what he knew was a now soaked customer. Christ, did people just forget to read?

“Um, it’s kind of an emergency.”

Adam perked up at the voice and whipped his head towards the entrance. He glared. “Shirogane.”

“Shiro.”

“What did you do this time?”

The dark-haired man smiled sheepishly, a hand rubbing the back of his head as the other arm cradled a black and blue motorcycle helmet. He was wearing his signature leather jacket, the material sporting a few hundred rain drops and glistening under the bright purple LED lights that hung above the entrance of the shop. His metal boots were almost ankle deep in the puddle he somehow could not avoid, and the splash must have soaked a good portion of the black pants he wore. Either his boots were so well protected that he could fall into any puddle without soaking his feet, or his toes were as wet as a fish and he was just too embarrassed to show it.

Adam secretly hoped it was the latter.

“Ah, well,” Shiro started, and he revealed the metal hand that had been scratching his head, “it’s my finger.”

Adam couldn’t see much from this distance, but he did notice that one of Shiro’s fingers—the pinky—was a little…. Well, it seemed to be hanging by a wire.

Switching his gaze from the gruesome scene, he shot Shiro a bored expression. “I thought you said it was an emergency.”

The man just shrugged. “I don’t like pain?”

They locked eyes then, Shiro with a hopeful smile and Adam mentally throwing daggers at him. A few seconds past and Adam eventually relented, throwing his head back and groaning.

“Sit,” he growled out.

Shiro gave him an awkward salute with his injured hand before scurrying from the puddle of rain water and towards the work table.

This was going to be a long night.


	2. Chapter 2

Electric sparks tickled Adam’s protected fingers, but he had grown used to the sensation by now. His gloves were designed to dispel most of the mechanical shocks he often encountered when working on prosthetics, so the flickers from the joint of Shiro’s pinky finger didn’t even faze him as he leaned in close, reconnecting wires and screwing in missing pieces. It just had to be _this_ finger, the one with the smallest parts. They were so tiny that Adam had to whip out the magnifying glasses, strapping the giant lenses over his much smaller and much sleeker spectacles. It was all a pain

_Shirogane_ was a pain.

“This is your third visit in a month.”

“Yeah….” Shiro shrugged, and Adam quickly steadied the man’s metal shoulder with his own hand.

“Stop moving.”

“Sorry.”

Adam just grunted and leaned back over his work. The wires were all back in order, thank God. Shiro was extremely lucky that none of them were ripped out, otherwise Adam would have had to find new ones, open the entire forearm up, and string the wires through to connect them to one of the several motherboards that were situated at each joint in the prosthetic. Adam probably would have killed Shiro in that case. Well, maybe not, but he would have threatened to kill him.

“So,” Adam finally said into the silence, “what happened?”

Shiro was about to shrug again, because that was his _thing_ , but he reconsidered after the look Adam threw at him. “Eh, can’t really talk about it.”

“And why is that?”

“Protocol.”

“Hm.” Typical.

Many strange customers walked into the store, most of them with occupations they couldn’t talk about. But they usually ordered new parts and upgrades, like pop-up guns or a laser that could shoot wider beams, so Adam had at least an inkling what they did for a living.

Shiro, though, was the strangest of them all, but only because he never asked for those kinds of things. He only requested a fix-me-up, sometimes walking in looking worse for wear. He was also the most regular of the shop’s customers—he visited every month like it was tradition, and each time he coincidently showed up during Adam’s work hours.

He was definitely mysterious, to say the least, with a scar that ran across his nose and a metal arm with lightening designs that pulsed a radiant blue. The motorcycle he left parked outside looked a little _too_ high tech, even for a city such as Platt, which was one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. Adam wondered if the reason why that bike hadn’t been stolen yet was because it had some kind of high-alert security system that probably blasted anyone that even thought of touching the thing with deadly lasers. The contraption had a weird logo on it, too. Adam didn’t really know what it stood for—it was just a large G—but he could only guess that it was top secret or something.

Either way, Adam refused to let himself waste even a second of his day thinking about the insufferable man, but he couldn’t help but wonder what Shiro did that resulted in the constant destruction of Adam’s hard work. And he was rather handsome, so maybe Adam thought about him just a little bit. Only a little bit, though.

Half an hour later, and Adam was finally done with the stupid finger. Before letting Shiro go, he opened up the small compartment just underneath his steel triceps and pressed a small button that could only be accessed by a rod as thin as a hair strand. There was a beep, and Shiro shivered.

Making sure that Shiro successfully had feeling back in his arm, Adam began prodding his hand and checking for any inconsistencies. Shiro’s nerves seemed to work just fine, his fingers twitching when they were supposed to and Shiro nodding in the affirmative whenever Adam asked if he could feel this or that. His job was pretty much done.

“You’re all fixed up.” He flicked Shiro’s pinky finger for good measure, earning him a soft ‘hey!’ from the man. “Now pay up. You’re getting charged for after hours.”

Shiro deflated, and Adam may have cut the price a little just for the pout on the man’s lips, but he didn’t have to know that.

Nonetheless, he was paid, and now he had even more tools to sterilize in the morning. He also still had to walk home in this rain, and he grabbed his jacket with a tired sigh.

Shoving his keys in his pockets, he walked through the small garage to turn everything off, feeling Shiro’s eyes on him the whole time. It was a little eerie, because the man usually left immediately, but when Adam turned around after shutting off the last of the lights, Shiro was standing near the entrance, a nervous and hesitant look on his face.

Adam walked the few feet to the garage door and stood in front of him with crossed arms. “What? You need something else, or are you looking to walk me home?”

It was a joke—Adam didn’t actually mean it—but Shiro bristled, a little shocked at his words.

“Actually…yes.”

“…Huh?”

Shuffling back and forth on his feet, Shiro looked outside for a brief moment, then turned to Adam again. “It’s raining. And it’s late.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Well, I just thought…I mean—” Shiro stumbled over his words, scratching the back of his neck with his freshly fixed arm.

Adam thought he saw a tint of pink on his cheeks, but he couldn’t tell in the now mostly dark shop if it was just the dude’s scar or not. And to be honest, Adam wasn’t in the right mindset to linger too long on that aspect; he wasn’t thinking straight at the moment. Literally.

“What?” he asked dumbly, because he couldn’t think of much else to say.

“It’s dangerous, don’t you think? I could—I could give you a ride. If you want. I feel like I kinda owe you something other than money for putting up with me.”

It took a few seconds for the words to actually process, and Adam had to admit, that was some good reasoning. Plus, he had seen Shiro’s bike, and it was the coolest thing Adam had ever seen. He’d always wondered what it was like to ride it, but he also just wanted to take it apart and study it. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea…but what if the guy was secretly a serial killer. Or a hitman. He decided to voice his concerns.

“No! No of course not,” Shiro exclaimed, waving his arms back in forth. Adam glared suspiciously at him; that’s what a serial killer or hitman would say.

But he let it go. If he died, well…hopefully there were no other shops that would fix Shiro’s arm for such a low price. And besides, there was another issue.

“Uh, your ride is a motorcycle. Wouldn’t we still get wet?”

The excited grin Shiro shot his way almost made Adam take a step back. The dude had an amazing smile.

“Actually, we wouldn’t get wet at all.” He held out his hand, the one Adam had just finished working on. “Want to find out how?”

He did. He really, really did. In fact, it peaked his interest so much that he felt a wave of adrenaline surge through his veins. He stared at Shiro’s arm, watching as the intricate lightening designs pulsed in the darkness, as if it was in sequence to the owner’s heartbeat. He then shifted his gaze to stare into Shiro’s gray eyes, a matching grin slowly etching onto his own face.

“Okay,” he said, and clasped Shiro’s prosthetic hand, the smooth material surprisingly warm.


	3. Chapter 3

“You know that’s covered under the Garrison, right? My dad can fix it for free.”

Shiro just nodded, wincing as he fitted the helmet over his head. “I know,” he said, and pressed a button on the side of his headgear.

A blanket of metal scales slid over his skin until it covered the entirety of his neck, connecting with the aluminum chainmail he wore under his shirt and jacket. A shiver ran up his spine as everything connected like it was made to do; the thin, horizontal opening over his eyes came to life, displaying information he mostly didn’t pay attention to unless his life was in danger. On the top right of his new and improved vision, a diagram popped up with a warning sign—one of his fingers was in critical condition.

Shiro rolled his eyes. He could have figured that out on his own, if the weird not-quite-human pain that zapped up his prosthetic arm wasn’t obvious enough.

“Seriously,” Matt continued, staring at what Shiro knew was just a helmet with a slit of luminous blue where his eyes were supposed to be, “Why waste your money on something you can get done for free? They don’t pay us _that_ much.”

“I don’t know.” Shiro shrugged. “Nice to see what regular civilians are up to every once in a while.”

His comrade scoffed and put his own helmet on, the design exactly the same as Shiro’s except he had decided to just keep the signature Garrison orange. “Yeah, well, regular civilians aren’t trained to work on alien-tainted prosthetics.”

Shiro only hummed in response, a little offended by the statement. His arm was a sensitive subject, but Matt didn’t know that, so he couldn’t be too angry at him. But the insinuation that those who didn’t work for the Garrison were inept in the science of prosthetics kind of angered Shiro.

Because the man who worked at The Old Skeleton was a fucking genius.

The sound of an engine starting ripped Shiro from his thoughts, and Matt spoke again, his voice altered by the helmet he wore.

“Just come back before curfew, okay? Iverson always interrogates me when you’re missing.” Shiro nodded again, and Matt was about to speed off before he turned to face him once more. “And you should at least let my dad inspect your arm. If you keep visiting that mechanic—that’s fine. Just get a check up every once in a while. Material not authorized by the Garrison could mess with the system.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You better.”

With that, he sped off, leaving a trail of bright orange in his wake.

Shiro sat on his bike for a few seconds, his mind already forgetting most of the conversation as he wondered back to a certain dark-skinned mechanic.

 _Adam_. That was his name. It only took Shiro his fifth visit to the run-down shop to gather that information. He was a stubborn man with quite an attitude, but his fingers were fast and nimble, and Shiro could tell they were just itching to help, to explore. To experiment.  

Shiro first met him when he had stumbled upon The Old Skeleton by accident—his arm was seriously screwed up, and he was on his third strike. If he went back to the Garrison with another severe injury, he would have been suspended and forced to undergo a psychiatric test. He didn’t want that—at all—especially since the Garrison had been trying to find any excuse to get him analyzed ever since the incident. He freaked out a little in his desperation, and before he knew what he was doing, he was walking through an opened garage and straight into neon purple lights.

Right into the skillful hands of Adam, who studied him up and down with crossed arms and a cocked hip.

Shiro remembered growing anxious, common sense finally catching up to him as he realized his arm had pieces of material that not even Garrison scientists could identify. How could this simple mechanic help him?

But then Adam’s gaze connected with his own, and what he saw in those lukewarm, brown hues was a man who was calculating a solution at the speed of light. He ushered Shiro to sit and worked on his arm for hours, never stopping to think, no hesitation at all. With just one look, Adam knew exactly how to mend all of Shiro’s problems. Even the weird tick in his shoulder was fixed.

It was amazing, and Shiro found himself visiting the shop more often than intended. Adam always acted annoyed nowadays, and he wanted to appear stone-cold, but it was obvious Adam had a nurturing nature that Shiro found endearing.

Shiro trusted him, and it may or may not have something to do with how hot the guy was, but Shiro had faith in himself that he wasn’t that shallow.

Nevertheless, that was who Shiro wanted to see at the moment, and as he looked towards the dark sky, finger throbbing at his side, he realized how late it really was. And the air had a musky smell to it, indicating that it was about to downpour again.

Revving his motorcycle, he sped down the alleyway and made a sharp left—the direction opposite of the one Matt took just moments earlier. He cruised down the side street with familiarity, and he may have gone 20 miles over the speed limit.

Afterall, Adam was a generous person, but he wasn’t _that_ generous.


End file.
